When I was in Primary School, we used to sing a hymn that began: "I'm going to paint a perfect picture, a world of make believe..." Creating a fictional fantasy world is something that many authors who write in the fantasy vein have to do and it was also something that I had to do today to prepare to write my novel.
I have to admit it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be, afterall how do you create a world from scratch. My earliest design started as a large diamond shape made up of 4 diamond shapes (the 4 kingdoms making up my world) but I quickly realised that this wasn't suitable fof my needs. Being a bit stuck I decided to seek help a la google, so I typed in 'how to create a fantasy world' by which I found a link to Holly Lisle's website http://hollylisle.com/. Holly is a published fantasy author with some great tips to wannabe writers and using her help and that of my artistic house mate I was able to create my world.
Creating the world and the objects in it was the easy part, naming all of the villages, towns, rivers, forests, deserts, mountain ranges, oceans and lakes was the difficult part. That's the part which has taken me hours, through dozens of internet searches from river names locally to latin translation websites I looked everywhere trying to name everything. It's not happened, my main mountain range which all my characters will have at some point have to cross still hasn't be named but I will cross that bridge (or should I say mountain) when I get to it. :-)
The next stage for me was to download pictures of the various places that I have imagined for my book. I am no great artist and can barely draw to save my life, so I have been googling for images and have also been using Deviant Art which is where my background image of my fairytale castle comes from.
I thought researching my previous novel which was set in the 18th Century was hard as i was trying to be as realistic as possible in terms of architecture,fashion, history and customs; but this fantasy novel which I have free rein on is so much more difficult to write as I am having to literally make things up as I go. At least I can use the internet to help me, I don't know how writers such as Tolkien and C S Lewis coped with out it when creating Middle Earth and Narnia. I don't even know where they came up with some of the names from. All I can say is that they must have had amazingly overactive imaginations.
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